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Sometimes when some folks approach me out of an assumed shared
cultural identity, I get tight. Recently another South Asian woman spoke
to me at a gathering and the more I talked with her, the more I could
see her pauses and the dawning disappointment that I wasn’t quite the
desi she was counting on. Meanwhile, I was getting tight.
And this is a different tight than what I feel when my [ethnic]
identity is not immediately apparent to and then, of course, immediately
questioned by a white person. Have a white person ask me where I’m
from, no, where I’m really from, and then where I’m “from from,” and I
sometimes am able to don a poker face that would make any professional
rounder proud. But hand me an infinitely more subtle passport check from
someone closer to my hue and I’m either awkwardly verbose or I pull a
sepia-toned disappearing act. Through my awkwardness, my body is
speaking with a tuning fork clarity. Across these interactions,
differentially, but still saliently, I am being asked to prop up a
version of myself so that someone else can have their colonial mirror
angled just so. In case it needs to be said, the cut from the person of
color is much deeper.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that I am necessarily able to,
even in a moment that I recognize to be colonizing, leverage the crunk,
the “mode of resistance [that] will help you get your mind right”
that I so admire. For me, the crunk, the ability to cast off
objectifying reflection with righteous indignation usually comes about a
day after, as I am sifting through words, gestures, and facial
expressions, often with the help of my closest sisters. This makes sense
given my socialization through a strongly patriarchal and abusive home
place where the role of women was to be small and to absorb waves of
internalized racist anger. The crunk comes later for me because the
silence and tightness always comes first. That the crunk comes at all is
a victory. It is a victory because it contains both my reckoning with
the indissoluble
ties I have with white heteropatriarchy and the nascent moves to exist
outside of those ties. For me, that has been the place of most
clarifying radical love I’ve known, a place where I move beyond my own
murmurs of radical politics to a more specific view that is cognizant of
yet not deferential and limited to the history of coloniality.And
therein lies some, just some, of the space that I think we’ve yet to
design in the name of radical love, how to be in relation with ourselves
and each other that is in full recognition of the genealogies of
colonialism. I been spending time filtering through interactions and I’m
concerned that in lots of activist circles, we might be misusing the
term radical love, in a manner that collapses different trajectories,
complex personhood, and variation for narcissistic purposes. I worry
that we assume a knowledge of each other instead of genuine inquiry into
the specifics of experiences, shared and not. We come by it honestly.
People of color are so pervasively, albeit differentially, under the
heel of white supremacist hetero-patriarchal settler colonialism that we
are perhaps understandably quick to want and assume a sameness. We
reach for solidarity and safe spaces even while we act out practices
that are more traditionally narcissistic, defining ourselves through
categories. Put another way, our uses of the term radical love don’t
automatically dismantle the traditions of colonialism, conquest, and
dominion. And we should never assume as much.
I know this may seem fundamental, even obvious, but I fear that we
underestimate the ways that metrics and assumptions of sameness and opposition
will continue to shape a love that is narcissistic, which is not really
love if you ask me, even in the midst of radical talk. When I quiet my
own political identity project enough to truly sit with the long and
ongoing reach of coloniality, I am more humble at the potential and
elusiveness of radical love. How could we, truly, have within our easy
reach the rhetoric, the language, and motions that would effectively
counter the still pervasive mythology that one person’s spotlight is
dependent on another person’s shadow? It makes sense that we would seek
each other out, and even use the language of radical love, when really
we’re just tilting our own mirrors, having been fooled that the role of
others in our lives is not to be themselves but to be something to us,
so that we can exist. Those sinews of needing others for our own
projects are deep and got a tight grip. The hell of this illusion is
that there exists no path to loving ourselves that subsidizes the
presence of others. But perhaps precisely because we know each other’s
vulnerable spots of authenticity, we zero in more than we cushion those.
As Audre Lorde labored hard to have James Baldwin understand in their epic conversation,
it is the sleight, opportunistic recognition of each other’s pain and
circumscribed humanity that lays the foundation for embodied imperialism
instead of radical love. And when I say labor, I mean labor.
In their ridiculously fly, dangerous, and rhythmically vibrant
conversation, Lorde warns the ever brilliant Jimmy B that he was plain
up assuming way too much sameness. She lays it out: “We have to take a
new look at the ways we fight our joint oppression because if we don’t,
we’re gonna be blowing each other up. We have to begin to redefine the
terms of what woman is, what man is, how we relate to each other.” Lorde
implores Baldwin to teach young black men to stop targeting their
aggression on black women. She was, I believe, cautioning Baldwin to
slow his appeal to come together so that he would reckon with the
gendered anti-black objectification and violence that was, and still is,
taking place. Her central point was that there is no coming together if
we cannot be honest about the ways that people of color take up the
colonial tactics of objectification.
This is the violence that I worry continues on, subtlety but
perceptibly, in the name of radical love; one that objectifies and
narcissistically assumes much too much. If we don’t learn to see
ourselves through similarity and difference and radically love those
differences, we’ll continue to separate. We’ll carry on categorically
sectioning each other off, ultimately becoming the weapons of
coloniality that seek differences to stagger and rank, to hurt. And we
don’t need a single white person in the room to do any of that.
Collectively, we are not in a place to easily manifest radical love
and I guess I’m mostly asking that we don’t force it like we are. To be
sure, I’m not denying that there have been some long jump-like strides
of late led by people of color unreasonably, radically daring to love
each other, despite the centuries-long, sad tropes of, for example, what
it means to be a black male. These spaces are crazy beautiful but not
the rule. We have overdeveloped muscles to differentiate and rank, to
passport check, but in doing so we have atrophied the muscles necessary
to radically love. While exhausting, we have to give birth over and over
to ourselves, to our understandings of each other. But, also perhaps
unreasonably, I believe this is a good initial place. Knowing that we
lack the language and analytics for something deeply necessary for our
very breath makes possible the omission’s demise. Maybe even makes it
certain.
Much gratitude for Gabriela Fullon for her insights into this essay
_______________________________________Lisa
(Leigh) Patel is a cultural worker, researcher and writer working with
youth. She is an Associate Professor of Education at Boston College and
works extensively with recently immigrated youth and teacher activists.
Like most children of immigrants, she played overlapping roles of child
and adult and was drawn to—and simultaneously felt like an outsider
to—many cultures. These early border experiences have been key to her
professional life has taken shape: as a journalist, as a teacher, and as
a researcher and writer. Across all of these experiences, her focus
has been on the ways that education structures opportunities in society,
and her daily work has been with youth who are marginalized through
those structures.